Scholars have long known that slavery, or the relative lack of such, played a key part in the creation of West Virginia during the Civil War. Thursday’s Disunion in the New York Times puts that fact in an interesting light with Susan Schulten’s piece entitled “How a Map Divided Virginia.” The map in question was issued by the United States Coast Survey in late Spring 1861 utilizing 1860 Census data and can be seen immediately below.

So the purpose of Coast Survey map was to encourage pro-Union sentiment in western Virginia by highlighting how little it was enmeshed in the peculiar institution compared to the rest of the Commonwealth. Susan Schulten shows that later versions of the map actually encouraged separate, loyal statehood by captioning the area as “Kanawha”–an early name for what became West Virginia.

The Coast Survey map also reiterates the insight of the table presented in the April 17 edition of Civil War Emancipation. This table showed a strong connection between the percentage of slaves in a state’s population and when or if the state seceded. Secession took place first in the Lower South, where the concentration of slaves was the greatest. They were joined, after Lincoln’s call for volunteers in the wake of the attack on Fort Sumter, by the four states in the Upper South with the highest percentage of slaves in their population in that region. Yet four other slave states in the Upper South with smaller concentrations of slaves chose not to secede.

Not just states had different percentages of slaves. Within many southern states certain areas had considerable concentrations of slaves and others not. The latter places tended to be where geography, climate, or other factors made impractical plantation agriculture. Since slaves could not be used profitably, there were relatively few in West Virginia, a mountainous region ill-suited for the production of staple crops. Other areas like it existed, mostly in Upper South, but in the Deep South as well. It was no coincidence they often were hotbeds of Unionist sentiment.

Clearly, the 1861 Coast Survey map makes manifest yet again the connection between slavery and the Civil War. Produced essentially as a piece of propaganda, it nonetheless highlighted the very real connection between slavery and secession, even as it sought to remind West Virginians of their relatively loose connection to the peculiar institution and thereby reinforce their loyalty to the Union. So, if the Civil War was about states’ rights then why did the Lincoln administration so early in the conflict produce a map for Virginia focused on geographical distribution of slavery?

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About Donald R. Shaffer

Donald R. Shaffer is the author of _After the Glory: The Struggles of Black Civil War Veterans_ (Kansas, 2004), which won the Peter Seaborg Award for Civil War Scholarship in 2005. More recently he published (with Elizabeth Regosin), _Voices of Emancipation: Understanding Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction through the U.S. Pension Bureau Files_ (2008). Dr. Shaffer teaches online exclusively (i.e., a virtual professor). He lives in Arizona and can be contacted at donald_shaffer@yahoo.com